THE HEAVENLY WORLD SERIES GETS A PLAY-BY-PLAY MAN :

Hall of Fame Broadcaster Buck Dies (Associated Press, June 19, 2002)

Jack Buck, who in nearly five decades behind a microphone became a St. Louis institution on par with the Gateway Arch and the Cardinals, died late tonight, son Joe Buck said. He was 77.

Buck started calling Cardinals games on radio in 1954, teaming first with Harry Caray, and for the last three decades with former Cardinals third baseman Mike Shannon. [...]

Throughout the Midwest, Buck's calls of Cardinals games made him a beloved figure. With each final out of a victory, he wrapped things up with his tidy, "That's a winner."

Buck chose to pause -- not speak -- when slugger Mark McGwire tied Roger Maris's single-season home run record in 1998. Then, he said, "Pardon me for a moment while I stand and applaud."

A whole group of great baseball broadcasters are reaching their final innings--Ernie Harwell, Vin Scully, Bob Murphy, Ralph Kiner, etc.--and won't be with us that much longer. Jack Buck, for reasons I never really understood, became somewhat controversial towards the end of his national broadcasting career and was replaced by a bunch of interchangeable young yuppies, the rare exception being his own son, Joe.

One of the reasons that baseball has such a sense of continuity is because over the course of a lifetime you hear the same guy describe the exploits of successive generations of players. Last year I turned on a Mets game on the radio (we just barely get WFAN, at night only) and there was Bob Murphy, who's been doing games for every year the club has been in existence. Adding to the effect, they'd brought back the old Rheingold ads (My beer is Rheingold the dry beer...). It was like being displaced in time. For all I knew, I could have been picking up stray radio waves from 1969, when I used to sneak a radio to bed so I could listen to games from the West Coast. When he began talking about players it became obvious it was 2001, but it's the same voice and he's just as enthusiastic about Benny Agbayani as he was about Ron Swoboda, so the games, the players, and the years seemed to flow together. Thus does baseball, unique among sports, pluck at the mystic chords of memory.

When we lived in Chicago, we not only got Harry Caray on WGN-TV, but you could just barely tune in the Cards, Tigers and Brewers (with Bob Uecker) on the radio. You could twirl the dial and get some of the greatest voices in sports history. What a privilege it was just to listen.

We'll never listen to another Cardinals game without thinking about Jack Buck. He leaves us with a great gift because the memories we summon will tie us to our past in a way that too few aspects of modern life are capable of doing. Pardon me for a moment while I stand and applaud.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 19, 2002 8:44 AM